I know what I want for Christmas this year

So I think I've found what I want for Christmas this year. Check out this awesome pirate ship from Hamley's (famous toy store in London):

This Giant Pirate Ship Will take your breath away

Our hand-crafted large pirate ship will take your breath away and for children it is the chance to be Captain Jack Sparrow in battle against enemy pirates on the high seas. It truly is the ultimate in themed play.

Ideal for outdoor play the ship includes upper and lower decks, anti-slip decking, fore and aft cabins with windows and cannons. With a solid brass bell, personalised brass plaque, Jolly Roger and ships wheel the high seas were never this much fun!

Dimensions: (H) 5.9 x (W)2.2 x (L) 7.5 metres.

UK Mainland Delivery only.

All that for only £28,000! - At that price, it won't just take your breath away...it'll take a good chunk of your salary as well!

As for where to ship it...well, that's still up in the air. We've received word that our household goods have cleared customs, but we're still a bit in limbo as to the final paperwork on our flat. More details as they are available...

Thanksgiving weekend

I don't think it dawned on me that we wouldn't be celebrating Thanksgiving this year like we normally do until probably Wednesday evening, when I was thinking of how most of my friends back home would be heading home for a nice four day weekend with the family and I was just getting ready for another day of work. Oh well...I do get more vacation days now that I'm a UK employee, so I suppose if I had realized it earlier, we could have made our own Thanksgiving weekend. As it was, though, I've had a pretty busy week at work and we're looking forward to getting into our own place and having our own stuff arrive (rather than corporate housing with rented furniture), so we'll have a belated Thanksgiving dinner when we're in our own place.

Speaking of which, our housing search has been successful and we're in the final stages of getting a lease signed on a nice place in Chiswick. It is a converted flat on the ground floor of a Victorian terraced home that has access to a nice sized garden in the back yard. A realtor in the States would probably list it as "charming" (if you've read Freakonomics, you know what I mean by that). It has a lot of personality and we're excited to move in and get settled. I'm posting a few pictures below...

This is a picture of the front of the house:



Here's the garden, as viewed from the kitchen window:

This is the main reception area (don't worry, we're not keeping the white furniture...we know better with two children):

Here's the kitchen, which is a pretty good size compared with several other places we looked at.

Finally, the children have been learning their Articles of Faith in Primary this year, but we decided as a family that we wanted to learn them together as well. They have really impressed us with how quickly and how well they are able to memorize, and it has been helpful to have discussions about what the words mean as we learn each new one.

Enjoy!



(hopefully my experimentation with YouTube works...let me know if you can't see the videos)

Have we found a place to live?

Hey everyone (or...all three or four of you who read this blog),

Anne and the children arrived safely in the UK last Thursday evening. I was able to meet them at the airport and we took a cab back in to the city, where I had just checked in to a corporate apartment earlier that evening. We'll be staying there for about a month while we find a place to live and hopefully will have our stuff arrive in time for us to avoid having to pay for extra time or sleep on the floor!

We wasted no time in looking for a place and spent all day Friday out with an estate agent (British for "realtor") who took us to something like 15 different properties in one day. Luckily, we were able to find someone from church willing to watch the children even though they had only briefly met us back when we were here in August.

We think we found a few properties we liked, including one that we put an offer on today (Monday). It will likely be a few days before we hear back, so until then, we're going to keep looking.

We'll post pictures of the house once we have some firm idea whether or not we'll get the house so everyone can see. We actually saw the house twice, once with our estate agent and once again the next day with only the listing agent. We took the children back by the house to get their thoughts - they really liked it, and as luck would have it, there is another family from the ward who live right across the street, so they invited us over for lunch after we had seen the house. They have four children and are also from the States, so that would be fun to live that close to another family in the ward.

Isabelle and Chase were asked to participate in the Primary program yesterday. Chase backed out at the last minute, but he did stand and sing all the songs from his seat with us. Isabelle not only agreed to sit on the stand and help with the singing, but she was also given a part to read, which she did very well, especially considering she had never seen that particular part before.

Chase did something funny last night. I had some work to do and Anne was taking a nap to catch up on some jet lag and to try to get over the cold she's been fighting off for several days. While she was sleeping, I set the children up to call Deedee and Grandpa. While on the phone, they spoke to their Uncle Mark and Chase explained that he had a "cough due to a cold." Apparently, Mark was confused by this, and he asked Chase "What's a cough due to a cold?" whereupon Chase turned to me and asked "Daddy, what's a cough do to a cold?" When I told him I wasn't sure what he was talking about, he then told Mark "He doesn't know what a cough does to a cold...)

Anyway, funny story and thought it worth writing down...

Moving update

Anne & the kids arrive in London tomorrow! We're all pretty excited.

They've had a great time in NJ visiting friends and attending church where we lived from 1996 to 2003. It seems like such a long time since we've lived there and it is a bit hard to believe that both kids were born there, now that we've lived in three (and now four) other places since then.

They all went to the American Girl store and the Build-a-Bear workshop in NYC today. They also went to Toys-R-Us. Isabelle got a cat for her American Girl doll and Chase got a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle and a "bad guy" to play with ("so they can fight each other").

Anne & the kids will get into London tomorrow evening and we'll move into a corporate apartment while (or "whilst" as they say here) we look for a place to live. We're supposed to meet with our relocation coordinator on Friday to go look at places in various neighborhoods that I've been scouting out over the past month or so during my weekends in London. We like Chiswick, Fulham, Hammersmith, and Clapham. There are some other places (St. John's Wood, South Kensington, Pimlico) where we'd love to live, but we'd also prefer to have a bit more space than a shoe box!

Here's one of the properties I liked, but it is pretty far from everything (way out in East Acton), so it might not work. Also turns out they have some pretty crummy schools in the neighborhood, despite how nice (and big for London!) the house is...

Wanted - new name for this blog

I'm now soliciting new names for this blog. We want to make this an "our" blog rather than a "my" blog, which means I'll have to come up with a better name than one that hearkens back to an old inside joke with some of my buddies in high school.

Any suggestions?

Move week

So two weeks since my last post, but apparently nobody noticed anyway, so I guess this is just for me for now.

This week is the week we begin our move to England. We're pretty excited about it, but it seems like there is just so much still left to do. Movers get here on Wednesday to pack the part of our stuff that is going overseas, then Thursday for the stuff going into storage. They'll be back on Friday to load everything onto the truck(s). Then it's four to six weeks until we see stuff in London.

In the mean time, I head back to the UK on Tuesday, while Anne & the kids start out on Saturday, stopping in NJ for a few days to visit friends we haven't seen in about four years. They'll join me next Thursday in London and we'll hopefully be able to start looking for a place to live on Friday. Busy, busy.

Today was the Primary program at church. The kids did such a good job. Chase was really sick, but had been practicing his part and really wanted to be there. He could barely keep his eyes open on the stand, but he stood up and did his best to sing every song, though he had to keep reaching for tissues for his runny nose. When his turn came, he delivered his part (including a recital of the 10th Article of Faith, which is his favorite, probably because he likes to say "paradisiacal") flawlessly and eloquently. Isabelle also did a great job and you could really tell she was singing out and that she had really made an effort to memorize all the songs. Isabelle invited her Kindergarten teacher from last year, something she had wanted to do last year, but then left it until the last minute when it was too late. This year, she remembered several weeks ago and invited her.

Carson was here for the weekend, and we enjoyed having him visit. He got to spend a lot of time with Isabelle and Chase, and Chase especially liked showing off his skills on the play yard out back with such an attentive audience. Carson and I watched part of the Cal game last night and decided that in a way, it is good that Cal has been playing so poorly the last three weeks because now we don't have to worry about the expense of traveling to Pasadena next January. Between Mark's wedding and a Rose Bowl, that could have been a pretty expensive month, especially from the UK!

Anyway, that's the latest from here.

How do I get started again?

So how do you start blogging again when it has been over a year and a half since your last post?

So much has happened in the last 18 months that the only way I can think of to get started up again is just to start posting bullet points and hope that gets the habit started again...

• Finally got off my crutches (as you know from my last post)


• Continued rehabbing my knee both in physical therapy and by working out in the gym at school


• Finished business school classes on Thursday


• Started work with Mercer Management Consulting the following Monday and was staffed on a case the next day (in retrospect, I should have taken a little bit of time off first)


• Graduated business school two Fridays later


• Finished our new house and moved in - pretty close to the scheduled end date


• Anne and I celebrated 10 years of marriage in August of 2006. We took a weeklong Caribbean cruise in October to celebrate


• Isabelle started school for the first time and loved it. Chase started preschool and loved it as well.


• Worked on an airline case for first nine months on the job. Met and worked with some great people and weathered some pretty dicey situations with a client in difficult financial straits, but in the end, the outcome for our work and the client's prospects was quite favorable.


• Got a dog (inherited Maggie from my parents, since she was needing some attention from a house full of kids)


• Took the whole family to a family reunion in Knoxville, TN to watch the Cal - Tennessee game with 108,000 screaming fans at Neyland stadium. What an experience! (and what a horrible loss!)


• Anne finally got her giant Christmas tree (seriously - it's like 16 feet tall and requires like 8 boxes of ornaments, two ladders, and an extra rider on your homeowners' insurance policy to decorate!)


• Went from airline work to retail work around the first of the year and have been there ever since...oh, and the client is in England, so I've been flying back and forth between London and Dallas twice a month since February!


• Mercer Management Consulting combined with several of its sister companies and rebranded under the name Oliver Wyman, the namesake of one of the sister legacy firms and actually one of the firms that Mercer had acquired several years earlier.


• Took a ten day family vacation to Kauai with cousins, aunts, and uncles, and had a blast - again!


• Made the trip (by myself this time) out to Berkeley to watch Cal exact revenge on Tennessee for the pounding they endured at their hands last year


• Have recently decided to transfer to the London office for a year or two - more on that later...

Anyway, hopefully that will get me started again - maybe in my next few posts I can come back and fill in some of the blanks, but for now, I'll just add a photo taken during our Kauai trip this past summer...